“It’s freaking me out,” Steve Bedard says. “It’s too much of a shock to the system.” Bedard is on the board of the Halifax Cycling Coalition and he’s talking about two big wins for cyclists.
In the same week, cyclists learned that Nova Scotia has become the first province to initiate a one-metre safety rule—motorists will have to give a one-metre berth as they pass cyclists—and that HRM is planning a cross-town connector lane for 2011. The lane will go from Young Avenue in the south end, up South Park Street to Bell Road, to Ahern Street, North Park Street, Agricola Street, west on Almon Street then up Windsor Street to the exchange at Kempt Road.
Having a clearly marked, north-south bike lane will make life easier, and safer, for two-wheeled commuters in this crazy intersection town. HCC and city staffers hope it will attract more downtown people to cycling as a legitimate transportation option, and cut down on peninsular traffic.
I was a cyclist for seven years in Toronto —I even sat on the Toronto Cycling Committee for a time—and cross-town connector bike lane proposals popped up every year I was there. In a city where 48 percent of residents cycle, those proposals went nowhere. For Halifax to get a connector lane within a year is a coup.
It started with an HCC subcommittee discussing concrete asking what it could make of the city. They looked at streets eligible for bike lanes under HRM’s Active Transportation Plan. To qualify for a bike lane, a street must be scenic, sufficiently wide and connected to other routes.
HCC found plenty of unused options and mapped out the north-south route. Then the footwork began, rounding up 1,400 signatures in nine shops and cafes, and letters from prominent health and environmental experts, all supporting the connector lane. The petition went to council as a 13-page proposal November 2.
Council responded by authorizing staff to do a tech review—traffic counts, checking if bike lanes fit with two-way traffic, parking implications and budgeting—and public consultation. Hanita Koblents, an HRM transportation planner, hopes to start public consultation this winter, and she acknowledges that the bike lane involves “some tough decisions,” particularly addressing a potential loss of parking on one side of Agricola, and moving the centre lane.
The consultation will likely include direct conversations with affected businesses and business commissions, the Chamber of Commerce and public interest groups, a comprehensive website and a public forum. “Our experience with the Herring Cove Road bike lane shows that opposition to bike infrastructure can be very serious,” Koblents notes, which is why the city is soliciting all opinions before moving forward.
Steve Bedard supports the slow approach. “They tried to bulldoze the rotary thing and Herring Cove and it didn’t work.” HCC’s petition asked for a completion date of 2011, so he figures the actual route will go down sometime in 2012.
“I think it’ll make it through,” he says.
He attributes the positive reception by council to HCC’s strategic approach. “We put together a concrete plan,” he says, “and I think the timing was good, with biking as an umbrella issue that is good for the environment, health and saves the city money in the long run. It’s a no-brainer and it’ll change the culture.”
Bedard knows culture change from personal experience. He says he used to be “one of those idiots in the car, leaning out the window yelling at cyclists.” Then he biked across France with friends and was blown away by the infrastructure, the courteousness of drivers to cyclists. He couldn’t see why that couldn’t be the case here.
Koblents adds that while HRM isn’t seen as a cycling mecca, peninsular Halifax does have a strong cycling culture, with four percent of the population being regular cyclists. “That’s high by North American standards,” she says. “With the high concentration of homes and jobs here, it’s a natural, but until now there’s been very little cycling infrastructure that’s actually connected.”
She hopes that, in addition to making existing cyclists’ lives easier and safer, the connector route will shift our travel choices away from single-occupancy vehicles. “Our Active Transportation Plan is broad, the timing is right and everyone agrees in principle,” Koblents says. “It’s time to test it in practice.”
This article appears in Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2010.
Great work Cycling coalition!
This is very exciting!
Hey Halifax Cycling Coalition, we are all behind you. Keep up the good work!
This is awesome news. Yea Halifax!
Are they going to close off the lane with chicanes or poles or something or is it just going to be a line of paint? If it’s only a line of paint, then families will still be pretty shy about using it and there will still be motorists crossing the lines like they unfortunately do on Brunswick.
Bikes should be on the sidewalk where they belong, not holding up REAL traffic.
Cars should be in the junkyard where they belog, not holding up REAL progress.
Hishighness
You thinks up that comment on your own… sad.
Go bikes!
While this will be good for the cycling crowd, I doubt it’ll raise fix the car culture in HRM. It probably won’t make 10% of HRM cycle to or from work. We’re a suburban workforce, not an urban one.
But keep celebrating those small victories.
Make the roads wider, then we can consider accommodating fringe groups such as this. Painting stripes marked “bike lane” on roads that are too narrow already and overloaded thanks to no upgrades in 60 years will do nothing.
Bo Gus: make the roads “wider”? There’s a vision: destroy more sources and destinations just so it’s easier to get from nowhere to nowhere. The ultimate goal is as few buildings as possible serviced by as many roads and parking lots as possible. Hell, why not just have drive-through workplaces?
Be serious, guy. “Wider”? That’ll work *where*, exactly? Oh, I see – you don’t mind tearing down residences and small businesses just so long as you can get from your suburban house to your urban place of work. Well, maybe other people do mind.
And this is not about “fringe groups”. You can’t overwhelmingly stack the deck in favour of single-occupancy commuter vehicles, while making it difficult for public transit to succeed, and while presenting substantial obstacles to bicyclists and pedestrians, all of which is currently the case, and credibly mutter about fringe groups. You have a city council which for the most part is completely unwilling to do anything that might offend car commuters, and that needs to change.
You can cooperate with other groups, buddy, or you can be a roadblock. Right now you sound like a roadblock.
For squeaky-wheel cyclists in this town, damn right I’m a roadblock. They need a dose of reality in their “aren’t we virtuous and deserving of special treatment” Kool-Aid. There are far too many main arteries that are clogged due to traffic and not being touched since the Great Depression. Robie between North and Charles is a good example, as is virtually any part of North itself. In Dartmouth, Victoria Rd or Woodland Ave are two other examples. Your gross exaggeration aside, it is self-evident that a 1-quart bottle cannot handle 2 quarts of liquid. That is what we are asking out obsolete road network to do. Adding another quart of bike lanes will cause it to totally fail. We need more capacity before doing projects like this.
Poor baby.
Its funny, in Europe I’ve bicycled in towns older than Canada, and they didn’t have an issue with bike lanes or biking infrastructure. So much for ‘our city is too old/narrow/whatever to accommodate bicycles’….
Bo Gus, the roads are a common good that serve everyone. Your fuel tax alone does not pay for road upkeep and construction — FAR from it. Pedestrians and cyclists were using the roads long before the advent of the automobile. The cars are the ones getting the “special treatment”, and have been since the 1950s all throughout North America.
A very basic concept of urban planning is that widening roads generally only makes things worse. They’ve learned this in Toronto well over 10 years ago. Build more roads and make it easier for people to drive, and more people WILL drive, clogging the roads faster than you can build new ones. Cities like Vancouver have learned that destroying their cores with new highway construction doesn’t solve anything, and for that they have very healthy public transit ridership, a very walkable downtown/core residential area, and one of the healthiest populations in North America. That this province is what, $13 billion in debt, and according to an article in the Herald spent over $600 million on highways in the past TWO YEARS alone blows my mind. Anyone who complains about mismanagement of money in this province but sees nothing wrong with the sordid amount spent on highways is a fucking hypocrite. The salaries of provincial staff are a drop in the bucket compared to the amount spent on new interchanges of questionable necessity all over the place, like the Larry Uteck Blvd exchange in the middle of nowhere outside Bedford. Urban sprawl will bankrupt us quicker than any overpaid politician will.
I think the inconvenience of the loss of parking on a few select streets is well worth the benefit of a long-overdue bike thoroughfare. Bravo to all those involved.
Bo Gus: if by “gross exaggeration” you mean the tone of my first paragraph, sure, I used hyperbole to make a point. But I encounter plenty of people who live out in the ‘burbs and work a good distance away who have exactly this attitude to what lies in between. To them the in-between is purely and only the road network, and all they care about is the road network, not the neighbourhoods the roads traverse. It’s precisely people like this, and there are tens of thousands of them, who will shortcut and speed in someone else’s neighbourhood during their daily commutes, but scream bloody murder when someone speeds on residential streets on *their* turf. And they don’t think twice about expropriation of property just so they can have a faster commute.
Victoria Road or Woodland Avenue, exactly what is it that you would do? Carve away more front yards and maybe buy up and demolish some houses is all you can do, and you know it. That’s just so you and your ilk can pretend you are getting to work faster, because like Calvin said, widen the road and more cars will fill it.
This isn’t a cyclist problem, this is a single-occupancy car problem. Not to beat around the bush here, we (and countless other municipalities in North America) have this problem precisely because people, for various reasons, are unwilling to be any part of the solution whatsoever.
You can argue until you are blue in the face with a guy (unfortunately not a hypothetical, nor an uncommon, case) who lives in suburban Dartmouth with excellent access to MetroLink and also to Woodside Park & Ride, and who works right downtown in Halifax (like a 10 minute walk max from the ferry), and who insists nevertheless on driving – alone – each and every day across the bridge and doing his part to make downtown Halifax look like a parking lot. This is the guy, and thousands like him, who clog Victoria Road and Woodland Avenue, and similar streets. We’ve catered to people like this for decades, all while moaning about why public transit doesn’t work. And if you occasionally ask these characters why they *need* to commute like this, you’ll get some lame-ass excuse as to needing to stop and get groceries every so often…or they’ll flat-out lie about where they live and make it sound like they can’t use Park & Ride. Puh-leez.
As far as I’m concerned it’s time to stop catering to people who *are* the problem. You think you’re a roadblock? Well, there’s plenty others of us who are more aptly named roadblocks, since we’re not happy about having new arterials created through core residential areas. We’re taxpayers and voters too, and we’re getting tired of having people in the ‘burbs reshape where *we* live, to our detriment. Suck that up, buddy.
Hey everyone. Thanks for the supportive comments! I hope you all will take the chance to write to your councillors and encourage them to support the CtC. I just thought I’d explain things a little bit.
Althoguh this piece of infrastructure would well serve the cycling population, the CtC was planned and designed moreso for the myriad of people we meet who consistently tell us “You know, I would ride my bike if there were more bike lanes in Halifax that make sense.” by make sense, we quickly figured out that we had to connect residential areas to the commercial centres of HRM. The CtC does this quite literally. Not only does it connect northe-enders to our major economic centres (ie, the CDHA’s QEII sites, Stadacona and the Universities), it will someday connect to the Bedford highway as it expands to bring that suburban population in to town.
As a nurse working at the VG on a medical/surgical floor, it’s becoming more and more important to get people up and active. It costs all of us an average of $90,000 per day to take care of someone going through some degree of Type 2 diabetes crisis. This could include something as simple as a hypoglycaemic event to something as profound as a foot/leg amputation. Furthermore, people with diabetes, cardiovascular diseases or other conditions related to inactivity make their recovery period much more difficult. Diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in particular increase risks of incisional wound infections significantly and can ensure patients stay as inpatients for weeks if not months. The disturbing thing is we’re passing the very behaviour that makes our generation unhealthy to our children.
The CtC is a very small step in the right direction to improve the transportation diversity of Halifax, and encourage more active healthy living among a larger group of people in HRM who are already interested in improving their health, contribute to the environment as well as those who are looking to save some cash along the way.
Also, our road system is paid for by the municipality via property taxes. Presently nearly a third of the municipal budget is consumed by road maintenance and expansion. Cycling has the potential to mitigate these costs, but we need to do more to increase the cycling modal share to do this.